Avatars in virtual worlds can have a wide range of business and social experiences, and such experiences are becoming more important as business and social transactions are becoming common in 3D virtual worlds such as Second Life. Second Life® is a registered trademark of Linden Lab. A virtual world is a computer-based simulated environment intended for its users to inhabit and interact via avatars. The characteristics of an avatar may play important social, business, and other related roles in virtual worlds. Virtual worlds are computed and managed by a large array of servers that are owned and maintained by the virtual world provider. A virtual world client program may provide its users (referred to as residents) with tools to view, navigate, and modify the virtual world and participate in its virtual economy. Social and business interactions are important in virtual worlds, and these interactions include resident interactions in both personal and business meetings.
An example may be a globally distributed team tasked with designing a jet airplane. Such collaboration can be represented as a set of avatars that are visually rendered performing the multiple design tasks along with visually rendering the different parts required to complete the jet airplane design.
An information technology (IT) data center in a virtual universe is most often represented as a collection of server racks, operational consoles, storage subsystems and network hardware. This is due to the fact that, when one walks through a real data center, all that can be observed is the infrastructure hardware and consoles. The problem with this is that for everyone, except the IT personnel, the view is meaningless and cannot be easily connected to what is understandable by customers, executive management, business owners, finance staff, and in most cases even application development. However, in the three dimensional (3D) world, it is possible to render views of a virtual data center that can be understood by anyone.
Virtual worlds and universes (these terms may be used interchangeably herein) represent the latest technological forefront and present a tremendous new platform for improving how people interpret what can be seen within a virtual data center, thereby improving an organization's understanding of the IT environment's impact on the business. These new capabilities will also enable innovative techniques for leveraging activities (either business or IT) and/or triggers to provide visualizations that represent different contexts not previously available. Therefore, there is a need to solve the problems associated as described above.